Review: Samsung Galaxy S6

The Breakdown

The Best Device of 2015!

Design

Display

Perfomance

Camera

Software

Pros

Incredible Camera
Stunning Design
Better TouchWiz Experience

Cons

No Expandable Storage
Very shiny and prone to fingerprints

Upon its release in the spring of 2015, the Galaxy S6 marked a new start for Samsung. Gone was the utilitarian plastic build of every Galaxy S past; in its place, glass and aluminum alloy, and a new double curve-screen sibling, the Galaxy S6 Edge. The Galaxy S6 leaves much of its Galaxy S5 DNA behind, hence the battery is no longer user removable and the device lacks a SD Card Slot to make the phone even more thinner.

Luckily for Samsung, the S6 is good enough to win back straying fans while also surpassing the all-metal HTC One M9 in extra features, battery life and camera quality. The S6 also brings forward Samsung Pay and can be easily connected to Samsung’s Gear VR.

Design:

With a matte aluminum alloy frame and Gorilla Glass 4 on the front and back, the S6 lives worlds apart from the plastic construction of five generations of Galaxy flagships. It’s obvious that this is a different beast, and one for which fans have been crying out for years. The S6 has Samsung’s familiar pill shape, with rounded tops and bottoms and straighter sides. The power button and nano-SIM card slot sit on the right spine. A micro-USB charging port and headset jack live on the bottom, and the left spine houses separate up-and-down volume buttons, just like the iPhone 6. On the back, you’ll find the 16-megapixel camera (same as the Note 4), and a sensor array that includes the camera’s LED flash and heart-rate monitor. Up top, the IR blaster beams out infrared for folks who want to use their phones as a TV remote.

One thing that we really hate though, is the protruding Rear Camera. It’s not as subtle as the iPhone and looks really out of place. The back is also very prone to fingerprints.

The phone feels really great to hold due to the premium combination of metal and glass. The edges are slightly rounded, hence the phone sits very comfortably in hand, though it does tend to get very slippery at times.

Display:

Samsung hasn’t bumped up the screen’s 5.1-inch size, it has spiked the resolution of its AMOLED display to 2,560×1,440 pixels, a density of 577 ppi. If you plan on using the S6 in its Gear VR accessory — which turns it into an Oculus Rift-style virtual reality helmet — the extra resolution should really pay off because the S6 will be only a couple of inches from your eyes.

Performance and Hardware:

For the first time, Samsung has opted to use its own octa-core Exynos processor instead of Qualcomm’s octa-core Snapdragon 810 chipset. The performance was always smooth even when we had opened intensive apps together. All the major games played well, we tested Real Racing 3, and it worked flawlessly.

Specifications:

Display size/resolution

5.1-inch, 2,560×1,440 pixels

CPU

8-core, 2,100MHz, ARM Cortex-A57

Memory

3GB RAM

Storage

32GB/64GB/128GB

Networking

802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 4.0

Operating system

Android (5.0) TouchWiz UI

Camera:

A 16-megapixel camera juts out slightly from the phones’ back, sporting the same resolution we see on its big brother, 2014’s Galaxy Note 4. The lens itself gets an upgrade over the Galaxy S5, to f/1.9, from the S5’s f/2.2 rear camera. It also supports Optical Image Stabilisation and Auto-HDR. On the front, Samsung installs a 5-megapixel shooter for wide-angle selfies, promising improved low-light photos. outdoor shots and those taken in ample lighting looked scads better than photos captured solely indoors under artificial lighting.

Samsung cameras still struggle with night mode and low-light shots. While the quality continues to improve year after year, you still don’t get uniformly awesome shots in these common lighting scenarios.

A S6 snapped by a S6

Samsung gives your Galaxy S6 a 1080p HD filming resolution by default, though you can also trade up to a 60fps frame rate, a resolution of 2,560×1,440 pixels, and the ultra-HD resolution of 3,840×2,160 (listed as UHD). You can also drop down several resolution notches.

Software:

No longer. Samsung’s take on Android 5.0 Lollipop scales back its own additions and leans heavily on Google’s Material design. Samsung succeeds in embracing a simpler layout without shedding all the software it’s built over the years, though Android deserves much of that credit for providing the framework. Other mainstays include private mode and call blocking, easy mode and Do Not Disturb, as well as popular gestures (like Direct Call) and Smart Stay. An area for installing themes has also materialized (there are three in my review unit so far). Kids Mode (and many, many others) hide out in the Galaxy Apps app, but other erstwhile tools, like the S5’s floating Toolbox of shortcuts, get the boot. Samsung in 2016, has also started rolling out Android v6.0 Marshmallow Update OTA!

We haven’t been able to test Samsung Pay as it is still no available in India (Boo! for that Samsung)

Battery Life:

The S6 has a 2,550mAh battery (the S6 Edge’s is a tiny big larger, at 2,600mAh). On an average the battery lasted 12 hour with medium intensive tasks. It is better than HTC M10 and sometimes even better than LG G4.

Conclusion:

The Galaxy S6 is the most competitive Android phone right now, capped only by the S6 Edge. Its Exynos processor seems to be at least comparable to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 chip performance in top-notch phones, with the S6 faring well (but not dominating) diagnostic performance tests and battery life doing at least as well as contemporary competitors (but not as good as last year’s model.)

Image quality also looks great on both S6 and S6 Edge cameras, though once again outdoor shots are better than indoor photos. Selfie quality keeps improving, making those shots look more natural and less scary-detailed.